<p>I've just been accepted to several schools, but I narrowed down my choice to MIT/Harvard. I'm thinking of majoring in science (still unsure though) and I am more of a nerd than a party person, although very outgoing, so people usually say I might be a better fit at MIT, but I feel like liberal arts are important too (I am also a musician) and it's hard to reject Harvard's linguistics/arts. If there are any current Harvard science concentrators here, could someone PM me please? I am looking forward to hearing about your experience with courses/faculty/student body.</p>
<p>Lol guys, how about I just make a post here that everyone can see and then you can PM me if you have any private questions? </p>
<p>Okay, science at Harvard: </p>
<p>THE GOOD
Professors are generally pretty accessible. They won’t go out of their way to make you come talk to them, especially if it’s a large class - but they have office hours that very few people attend, and are generally very eager and willing to engage with students. This is of course a general statement - there are a few unfortunate exceptions - but it’s largely been my experience.
The research opportunities are fantastic. I’m working in a really great bio lab where I’ve been given an essentially independent project in my first semester there. My PI is a huge figure in the field I’m interested in, and through her lab I have access to some of the most cutting-edge (and pricey!) technologies around. Research is especially good for biology, since undergrads have access to all of the Harvard on-campus labs and the Longwood/HMS/Boston Children’s labs and Mass Gen labs. I’m not as familiar with other areas, but smaller science concentrations like Astrophysics have really great advising and a lot of research opportunities for undergrads as well.
World-class professors doing world-class research. Harvard is a science giant. If you’re deciding between Harvard and MIT this obviously won’t be as much of an issue, but between, say, Harvard and Yale, there’s a lot to be said for having science professors who are at the top of their fields and who are doing amazing, cutting-edge work. Even if you don’t work in their lab, it’s really a great experience to be taught by some of these people.
Classes CAN BE very small. See the point below for a caveat here, but once you get to upper-level science classes, they can be very small, intimate and fun.
Money. Harvard has a lot of it - more than any other school. Harvard can be really stingy at times (we don’t have hot breakfast in upperclass houses…), but they really are pretty good about funding you if you want to do research. There are a lot of fellowships for research abroad and domestically; some science classes will take trips to do field work (notably Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Astronomy); etc. </p>
<p>THE BAD
Intro classes suck. Almost universally. They are large. They are ill-organized, with HUGE numbers of teaching staff who can’t get their stuff together, shirk responsibility because there are so many other people, and decide what’s on exams - but are NOT the ones lecturing (professors lecture, TFs run section). The teaching staff can be good or very bad; they’re generally grad students who have to be TFing and are very hit or miss. There are also sometimes UNDERGRADS running the course - my intro physics course this semester has a JUNIOR as the head TF, and all of the TFs are pretty terrible. A lot of math classes are taught entirely in section WITHOUT a professor, ie all your instruction will be from grad students, and your papers will be graded by an undergrad. Grading is competitive. Exams are not always reasonable in either content or difficulty. Grading errors are frequent. Biology is particularly bad in this respect. I’m a sophomore and I’m still taking bad intro classes for my concentration. I think there’s a CCer who got so fed up with an intro genetics class (LS1b, if you want to do background reading on this disaster) that she transferred or something. You get the picture.
Labs are almost always useless. This is mostly because most labs are for intro classes, and intro classes suck. I haven’t yet had a useful lab. Orgo might be an exception to this, but bio labs are generally awful.
Competitiveness. Harvard isn’t SUPER competitive overall in terms of grades, but a lot of biology classes are bad. People aren’t outwardly aggressive or sabotaging, but the premed types make things very stressful and on-steroids for everyone else. (This statement will likely be a controversial one, but it’s been my experience. I don’t do badly or anything - my GPA is pretty high - but I still dislike the atmosphere in a lot of my bio classes.)
Advising can be sub-par. In a lot of science concentrations, that’s not true; I have a friend who’s doing a physics/astronomy joint, and he has a huge number of reasonably involved and very nice advisors. But in some of the bigger bio concentrations, the advising is pretty bad. </p>
<p>That’s basically my list. Overall, I’m liking my experience. But I do admit that my concentration experience specifically has pretty much sucked. I like the content of the classes that I’m taking; I like my research. But I really dislike my advisor and the mechanics of many of my courses. </p>
<p>I expect this to get better next year when I’ll be mostly out of introductory classes, but it’s definitely a pain for now. This would be better, I think, if I weren’t in biology - my friends in other science concentrations seem much more satisfied, so you should take my concerns most seriously if you’re a bio person, and much less seriously if you’re not. </p>
<p>Even so - I’m very grateful to be here, and as someone who’s very intent on graduate school, I feel that my preparation will be very, very good. </p>
<p>Sorry, that was kind of long. Feel free to PM me with questions or post them here!</p>
<p>Just to provide a little balance, my daughter is a junior concentrator in physics and she has not had the same experiences as listed in Elanorci’s THE BAD above. I am not dismissing Elanorci’s complaints, I am just saying they may be department specific.</p>
<p>Good points. Entering students need to remember that sometimes there’s more of a difference between the experiences of two students in two different departments within one university than between two students at different universities studying the same subject. Universities are not monolithic entities.</p>